Due to innovations in network computing technologies and applications, many companies, businesses and organizations currently provide e-business services on global communication networks such as the WWW (World Wide Web) and the Internet. Such services are typically provided through an entity's Web site. Most organizations, however, do not have the necessary IT expertise to maintain their own Web sites or maintain such Web sites in a cost-effective manner. Furthermore, with the rapid advancement of dynamic e-business technology, organizations are no longer satisfied with isolated e-business applications and have the heavy burden of application integration. Corporate customers prefer to have an industry solution that is customized for their needs and ready to be used. As a result, many organizations outsource their IT services, including the management of secure Web sites, to an IT service provider such as IBM Global Services, which is expected to deliver domain-specific e-business solutions on time and at low cost.
Various systems and methods have been developed or proposed for providing SLM (Service Level Management). SLM refers to the disciplined and proactive methodology and procedures used to ensure that adequate levels of services are delivered to service requestors. The basis for SLM is service level agreement (SLA). A SLA is a contract between a service requestor and a service provider that specifies the minimal acceptable levels for a service. Such SLAs can include for example, requirements for quality of service (QoS) and security. SLM systems are important tools for managing the two-party relationship between a service provider and a service requestor.
The majority of the conventional contract management or service level management tools focus on external parties (e.g., trading partners) individually and, therefore, a global view is missing. For example, the proposed WSLA (Web Service Level Agreement) and tpaML (Trading Partner Agreement Markup Language) specifications of International Business Machines Corporation address the issue of managing external relationships. However, the focuses of such specifications are on one-to-one individual relationships, but do not provide solutions for managing a one-to-many relationship taking into consideration inter-dependencies among parties, for example.
Further, there are other standards or specifications that have been proposed to address different aspects of business process management. They are briefly described below.
BPSS (Business Process Specification Schema), from ebXML (electronic business XML initiative), provides a standard framework by which business systems may be configured to support execution of business collaborations consisting of business transactions. BPSS supports the specification of business transactions and the choreography of business transactions into business collaborations. Each business transaction can be implemented using one of many available standard patterns from ebXML. These patterns determine the actual exchange of business documents and business signals between the partners to achieve the required electronic commerce transaction.
BPML (Business Process Modeling Language) from Business Process Management Initiative is a meta-language for the modeling of business processes. BPML provides an abstract execution model for collaborative and transactional business processes based on the concept of a transactional finite-state machine. BPML considers e-business processes as made of common public interfaces and as many private implementations as process participants. This enables the public interface of BPML processes to be described as ebXML business processes or RosettaNet Partner Interface Processes, independently of their private implementations.
XPDL (XML-based Process Definition Language) from WfMC (Workflow Management Coalition) is an XML-based language for defining business processes. One of the key elements of the XPDL is its extensibility to handle information used by a variety of tools, as XPDL may not be capable of supporting all additional information requirements in all tools. One of the most important elements of XPDL is a generic construct that supports vendor specific attributes for use within the common representation.
BPEL4WS allows companies to describe business processes that include multiple Web services and to standardize message exchange internally and among partners. In BPEL4WS, business processes can be described in two ways. Executable business processes model actual behavior of a participant in a business interaction. In contrast, business protocols use process descriptions that specify the mutually visible message exchange behavior of each of the parties involved in the protocol, without revealing their internal behavior. The process descriptions for business protocols are called abstract processes. BPEL4WS provides a language for the formal specification of business processes and business interaction protocols. By doing so, it extends the Web Services interaction model and enables it to support business transactions. BPEL4WS defines an interoperable integration model that should facilitate the expansion of automated process integration in both the intra-corporate and the business-to-business spaces.
BOpS (Business Operational Specification) defines a notation for specifying the operational view of a business. This notation is called Business Operational Specification (BOpS) and is expressed as XML schema definitions. A layered view of business system modeling is utilized. In this view, a business system is composed of three layers: strategy, operation, and execution. BOpS addresses the modeling of the operational layer of a business system. By doing so, it bridges the gap between strategy and execution, enables the automated generation of execution models, and facilitates the tracking of execution against the strategy.
The aforementioned languages primarily address the definition and execution aspects of a business process. However, these specifications do not provide mechanisms for monitoring and controlling business-level SLAs and relationship among parties.